pelago

The Pelago offices are safe from the fire, although we are only a block away from the evacuation warning boundaries. We are ready to unplug the servers and load up the cars if we have to. Our Intervals data centers are in Houston, so there are no worries about interrupted service for our customers. Here are some links to fire updates (note: some of the links may be spotty due to the fires):

• Google maps mashup showing evacuation zones
• Westmont College web site
• Westmont blog with pictures and updates
• Photos of the fire from the Westmont Campus
• SB County Evacuation Updates
• PDF Map of Evacuation Areas
• Updates from Daily Kos
• Streaming Video from KCAL
• Local Coverage from the Independent
• Photos from the LA Times
• Fire Photos at Flickr
• Edhat Updates
• Crisiswire

Here’s a great time-saver extension. Toolbar Buttons is perfect for adding tough-to-find Firefox functions. They’re there BUT you have dig deep within Tools > Options to get to them. Need to quickly disable javascript, flash and images with just three quick clicks? No problem, just drag and drop the buttons. Here is my current setup:

A lot of people are familiar with PHP’s functions, and though Javascript functions are often quite similar, some functions may be missing or addressed differently. The Javascript implementations should be as compliant with the PHP versions as possible, a good indication is that the PHP function manual could also apply to the Javascript version.

http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/

UPDATE: Using this article at http://www.hagrin.com/315/installing-mcrypt-a-godaddy-linux-virtual-dedicated-server-vds I was able to install mcrypt on a Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Server in just a few steps:

1. SSH into your VDS with your favorite SSH client or the SSH Java applet offered by GoDaddy.
2. Login with your credentials.
3. Su to the root user.
4. Type “yum install libmcrypt”. Say yes to the prompts.
5. Type “yum install php-mcrypt”. Say yes to the prompts.
6. Restart the server using “/usr/sbin/apachectl restart”.

We recently deployed a web site using GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated server. Everything about the default PHP installation was fine, except that libmcrypt was not available. When I asked the godaddy support staff “How do we enable libmcrypt for PHP?” their response was far from helpful:

Thank you for contacting Server Support. Unfortunately 3rd party installations and configurations are not supported.

Rather than argue with the support team about what constitutes a 3rd party installation, I decided to google around and see if I could do it myself. Hours later, I succeeded. Here are the steps for installing libmcrypt:

1. su root
2. yum install gcc-c++
3. yum install lex
4. yum install libxml2
5. yum install libxml2-devel
6. yum install flex
7. wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mcrypt/libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz?modtime=1171868460&big_mirror=0
8. tar -xzvf libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz
9. cd libmcrypt-2.5.8
10. ./configure
11. make
12. make install
13. wget http://museum.php.net/php5/php-5.1.6.tar.gz
14. tar -xzvf php-5.1.6.tar.gz
15. cd php-5.1.6
16. ./configure –with-mcrypt=shared,/usr/local/lib
17. make (after running ‘make’, DO NOT RUN ‘make install’)
18. cp modules/mcrypt.so /usr/lib/php/modules/
19. Add a file /etc/php.d/mcrypt.ini
    ; Enable mcrypt extension module
    extension=mcrypt.so
20. /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

That’s it! To confirm a successful install, just run phpinfo() and look for the mcrypt section

There’s a bug with 2.5 that doesn’t allow you to moderate comments. The problem is with the _wp_get_comment_list function and how it retrieves counts from the database specifically a missing column index. Running this line on your database should fix the problem:

ALTER TABLE wp_comments ADD INDEX ( comment_date_gmt );

Want to watch higher quality YouTube videos?

Add &fmt=18 to the last part of the URL. You won’t see DVD quality video but you’ll see a great difference from whats currently available.

Edit: Want to make it even easier? This GM script does it for you.

So I was working away at localizing some pages and for some reason they all worked except tr_TR. What was the problem? The server had an outdated PHP installation with a bug that lowercases class names which ends a fatal error.

Why it it so? After some investigations I came across this bug and came to the conclusion that in the Turkish language, the latin i is not equal to capital latin i.

AWESOME!

Just had to do this and thought I’d post it for anyone who might find it helpful. Here is how you enable the Debug menu if you’re running windows:

1. Navigate to the folder below (replace USERNAME with your user account).
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari

2. open up Preferences.plist and add the following two lines anywhere before the line “</dict>”

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true />

3. Restart Safari and you should now have a Debug menu.

On one of our sites were were running into a problem when we tried to pass HTML content from a database through an email obfuscation function to prevent spiders from scraping our clients’ email addresses. We quickly discovered that some of the longer pages were showing up completely blank. The preg_replace() function we were using to run the obfuscation code on email addresses was returning null. After some hunting I found the answer.

(more…)

The new year always brings with it a few small things that go bump in the morning. 2008 was no different. Intervals started behaving oddly on New Year’s Eve morning — the default timesheet was a year behind schedule. What happened?

In our PHP code, we are using the ISO-8601 week number of year, as specified on the PHP date function page, but we weren’t using ISO-8601 for the year. The ISO-8601 week number specifies the last monday of a year as the first week of the new year, if that new year begins before thursday. Intervals thought it was the first year of 2007!

In PHP, the fix was as easy as converting all instances of date(‘Y’) to date(‘o’), according to php.net:

ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0)

That fixed everything on the PHP side of things. But next we had to dig into the SQL queries and get them to use the ISO Year.

Snag.

PostgreSQL 8.2.5 doesn’t support ISO Year in the Extract function. EXTRACT(ISOYEAR, timestamp) is being included in PostgreSQL 8.3, as specified here in the RC1 documentation. But PostgreSQL 8.3 hasn’t been released yet, and we needed to fix things immediately.

Our final PostgreSQL fix was to instead use the TO_CHAR(timestamp, ‘IYYY’) function. It’s not ideal to be using a string formatting function for data comparisons, because it slows down some of the queries. But we had to trade some performance to get things working properly again in the new year. As soon as the PostgreSQL developers release a stable version of 8.3, we’ll change our queries back to using EXTRACT(ISOYEAR, timestamp).